Disruption, Deflection, and Acrimony: The Right-Wing Fallout From Charlottesville

The violence surrounding the August 12 Unite the Right white nationalist event in Charlottesville has rocked the US, drawing President Donald Trump into a neo-Nazi controversy and raising the specter of white supremacy re-entering the mainstream. The ripples from Charlottesville have been felt online, too, including among right-wing and white nationalist activists, who themselves have faced a tumultuous few days.

As well as dealing with widespread condemnation of their motivations and actions, they have faced disruption to a number of platforms and websites, suspension of access to a number of web services, and had personal profiles taken down. Disputes have also flared between a number of high-profile right-wing activists.

Storyful’sPadraic RyanandBen Deckeroutline how the aftermath of Charlottesville played out on right-wing platforms in the days following the violence.

Websites down, Daily Stormer on the move

The Daily Stormer, Vanguard America, and Gab, a right-wing alternative to Twitter, were among the platforms favored by white nationalists that were affected in the days following the violence in Charlottesville.

Neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer had its dailystormer.com domain taken down after it was blacklisted by both GoDaddy and then Google. The blacklisting followed an article on the site in which Andrew Anglin, its founder, insulted Heather Heyer, the woman killed when a car was rammed into a crowd of people protesting against the Unite the Right event. Other domains, dailystormer.wang and dailystormer.ru, were subsequently launched and then taken down.

On Tuesday, August 15, the Daily Stormer surfaced on the Tor Network, where Anglin alluded to comments that day by Donald Trump, in which Trump laid blame for the violence at the Charlottesville event on both Unite the Right participants and counter-protesters he labeled as the “alt-left”.

In another post on the site dealing explicitly with Trump’s comment, a user called Zeiger hailed the president’s intervention as a “huge victory” for Nazis.

GoDaddy and Google weren’t alone in acting against the Daily Stormer: CrowdFlare, Zoho, and Sendgrid were amongst those to suspend or remove the site’s services. DigitalOcean, which told Tech Crunch it had stopped providing services to Daily Stormer in December 2016, also suspended services for a fundraising platform favored by white nationalists, Hatreon. The Daily Stormer went on to use Namecheap, a hosting service described by Anglin on the Tor version of the site as “pretty much the last chance for getting a registrar to accept my hosting.” However, that company, too, removed the DailyStormer domain.A Twitter account associated with the site, @Rudhum, was also suspended.

News of the Daily Stormer having been taken down attracted widespread attention, and was criticized by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, among others. Carlson made clear his opposition to the site’s content; he objected to its removal on free speech grounds. Carlson’s objection was noted by Andrew Auernheimer, a developer associated with the Daily Stormer and known online as Weev, who posted about it on Gab.

Other websites and platforms were also affected.

WordPress took down bloodandsoil.org, the website of Vanguard America, an organization whose members were seen prominently in Charlottesville. James Alex Fields, the man accused of driving the car that killed Heyer, was seen with members of Vanguard America at the Unite the Right event.

UnityandSecurity.org, the website of Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Unite the Right event, was taken offline. The organization’s Facebook profile was also removed. (Kessler found his offline communications curtailed, too, when he was forced to flee a press conference he attempted to give on Sunday, August 13.)

Messaging app Discord, which had previously been identified as a base from which American and French social media smear campaigns were launched in 2016-2017, released a statement in which it said it had “shut down the altright.com server and a number of accounts associated with the events in Charlottesville.” The statement continued: “We will continue to take action against white supremacy, Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate.”

GoFundMe reportedly said it had removed several attempted fundraising efforts for Fields (rivals Kickstarter and Indiegogo said they had not seen any attempted fundraising efforts.) A legal defense fund set up by Kessler on Sunday was taken down.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also weighed in, saying in a post that it was the company’s policy to take down “any post that promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism — including what happened in Charlottesville.” The event page for the Unite the Right event was also reportedly removed from Facebook.

Meanwhile, a campaign was announced on Tuesday, August 15, by the Anonymous hacking group, which said it was launching an operation against “domestic terrorism” and would target white nationalist websites.

Personal profiles removed

A number of individuals associated with the Unite the Right event had personal profiles removed from social media platforms.

Christopher Cantwell, a white supremacist who featured prominently in a Vice News documentary about events in Charlottesville, had his Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter profiles removed or suspended – though not before posting a clip in which, upset at the prospect of being arrested, he sobbed to camera. Cantwell’s LinkedIn profile was unavailable at the time of publication. On it, Cantwell had described himself as in the “infotainment business” and said that he hoped to “help build a society free from initiatory violence and coercion, by showing people how absurd and unnecessary these behaviors are.”

Gab ‘under attack,’ then a go-to spot?

On Tuesday, August 15, Gab claimed to have been targeted by “the largest DDoS attack we’ve had in months.”

Gab first rose to prominence in 2016 after tens of thousands of white nationalist Twitter users were kicked off the platform, and it has since become the predominant echo-chamber for like-minded nationalists in the US and abroad.

Gab was one of a number of locations where news of the Daily Stormer’s new Tor presence quickly spread on August 15 and 16. The news also featured in a number of threads on 4chan’s /pol board.

Posts from Anglin’s profile suggest Gab may become more and more popular for right-wing activists.

As regards online fundraising, despite the difficulties outlined above, the right-wing activists have found a solution in BackTheRight.com, a crowd-funding platform. “For too long conservatives have had to support platforms that are opposed to their convictions,” the site says. “At BTR, our mission is to empower liberty minded people to unite around ideas that matter to them. With the help of the vast conservative community.”

Kyle Chapman, also known as Based Stickman, one of the speakers at the August 19 Boston Free Speech event, has been using BackTheRight to help with his legal fees. Chapman reportedly faces felony charges arising out of an incident in California’s UC Berkeley campus in March of this year.

Intra-right wing acrimony

Another aspect of the fallout from Charlottesville has been further fracturing of various elements of the right-wing conservative movement. For instance, in a video posted to YouTube on August 15, Mike Cernovich, a high-profile right-wing social media personality and conspiracy theorist, sought to distance himself from the self-styled white nationalist “alt-right” movement.

Cernovich said the “alt-right” was essentially a “deep state operation designed to discredit Donald Trump” and claimed that a Nazi element of the white nationalist movement had not been made clear to conservatives who had joined it during the 2016 presidential election.

Infowars social media personality Paul Joseph Watson also sought to distance himself from the white nationalist movement, saying, “How many times do myself, @JackPosobiec & @Cernovich have to be attacked by the alt-right before the media stops calling us alt-right?”

Spencer, who describes himself as the founder of the “alt-right” movement, said of Cernovich, “No serious person takes you seriously, Mike” and mocked Posobiec as the “alt-lite.”

Summary

The developments outlined above have significantly affected right-wing activists and white nationalists online. Across platforms and profiles, their ability to raise funds, coordinate behavior, and spread their points of view has been curtailed. However, it’s important to note that these incidents relate in the main to public behavior online: they do not deal with private forums, private messaging apps, and closed groups such as Twitter rooms. It’s also worth noting the terms used are frequently up for debate: “white nationalist,” “new-right,” and “alt-right” are just some of the contentious descriptors. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, if it hadn’t done so before, white nationalism announced itself in Charlottesville.

Storyful has built a team of editorial and technology staff who monitor extremist content on an ongoing basis. This work allowed us to track developments arising online, on a wide variety of platforms, following the Unite the Right violence.